In March 2006 I saw a performance by Jyri Pitkänen at the PAIR01 performance art event in Lahti, where I was performing with Karolina Kucia. Erkki Pirtola (2006, n.p.), a master archivist of Finnish underground and outsider art, descri-bed Pitkänen’s performance in the following way:
Perfo-events are good in the sense that the performances make me surprised at how different they are. The forms of performance are usu-ally very simple. They might resemble vernacular games or everyday actions […] Jyri Pitkänen was wrapped as a plastic mummy, and I heard crying that broke down into suppressed laughter. A young girl went and left a red and yellow bouquet of roses under this human statue.
[translation mine]9
Not that this performance was anything out of the ordinary, but it nevertheless was able to make me agitated. I was not sure what my role was as a member of the audience. How should I react or what should I think about the performance, which was highly personal, and at the same time crudely formal? It was a typi-cal performance in a style where the form of performance alludes to sincerity or authenticity, yet there seems to be no admitted connection with emotion
9 ”Perfo-tilaisuudet ovat siitä hyviä, että esitykset yllättävät erilaisuudellaan. Esitysmuodot ovat yleensä hyvin yksinkertaisia. Ne saattavat muistuttaa kansanleikkejä tai jokapäiväisiä toimintoja.
[…] Jyri Pitkänen oli kääritty muovimuumioksi ja kuului itkua, joka katkeili tukahtuneeksi nauruksi.
Nuori tyttö kävi asettamassa punakeltaisen ruusukimpun ihmispatsaan juurelle" (Pirtola 2006, n.p.).
or affects. To witness such performance we might often feel as if we had been punched in the face, which, I believe, is intentional, yet I started to question why it was so. I knew that the performer’s father had just died and, while watching his distorted figure wrapped in foil in a contorted form, I could see that he was suffering. I asked myself whether I was supposed to act or whether I should just reflect upon this contorted form. It brought to mind the self-proclaimed pope of body art, Marina Abramovic (2013, n.p.), when she described her early performance, Rhythm 0 (1974), as one of the “most extreme pieces […] where I really pushed my body to the limits.” In this performance she had given permis-sion to the audience to do with her body whatever they wished to do. Words like
‘challenging’, ‘hard-core’, ‘extreme’ or ‘scary’ are evoked by Abramović’s work or by Pitkänen’s performance, as well. However, these kinds of performance do make me feel upset and agitated.
Moreover, I feel uneasy when artists such as Abramović or many others have turned their practice into a ‘legacy’ or into an institution fitted in the era of immaterial and affective labour, where other products of the industrial era had similarly been turned into institutions or legacies10, as well. In spite of that, it was this perturbation which led me to consider more thoroughly what was happening, or how it could be researched. What had changed from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s that what once was regarded as challenging or authentic now seemed to have become an assorted medium of circus tricks and the simulation of authenticity? What had happened in the live practice, so that it had started to resemble a subculture institution? It was not only Abramović who had been moulding herself slowly into an institute, but the whole practice of performance art grounded on dichotomies of body-mind; presence-absence has been turned into a colossal institution. In Pitkänen’s performance it was not unbearable loss that I was confronted with, but the unbearable contortion of a form. Performance art had started to exist as a caricature of itself.
Following these perturbed emotions I started to write a draft for the Professor of Performance Art and Theory, Annette Arlander, for the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. I drafted a plan for an inquiry into what I had witnessed that so much perturbed me. My intention was to exemplify a research question in relation to my artistic practice and in autumn 2007 I had created a nest of concepts to start with my doctoral research. These concepts were meant to be thematical
10 How poignant it is that Abramović has entitled the website of the Marina Abramović Institute as www.immaterial.org.
conceptualizations for the artistic works as well as reflections upon them. These concepts were the following: 1) Border (or contour) 2) Imaginary, 3) Audience, 4) Gender, 5) Filth, 6) Body/Psyche, and 7) Evil. A theoretical starting point for the research was based on the critique of psychoanalysis presented by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, but also on the pschoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, and the performance analysis presented by Anthony Howell (1999). My focus was on the relationship between the audience and the performer. In my plan they were reflected in the context of post-industrialism, and my aim was purportedly to produce a critique of artistic practice in the context of neoliberal capitalism. Apart from the seven concepts presented above, some concepts by Deleuze and Guattari such as flow, becoming, machinic and assemblage were juxtaposed with them. A central argument at that time was that performance – or artistic production in general – is a factory, instead of a theatre or stage11. I considered performance to be a territory to be occupied with discursive or representative acts. In my draft this territory was defined as feminine, where the role of the audience was not the one of pure gaze, but impure and confusing – following Lacan and Howell. The audience represents the Other for the Imaginary12 of the performer, similar to Lacan's (1998, 118) concept of fascinum, the evil eye.
Howell (1999, 45) appropriates this concept in such a way that the gaze arrests the movement of the performer, actor or dancer. Following this, the stage or the territory of performance is in a state of confrontation or even in open conflict.
Therefore, my initial interest in research was on the production of conflict and antagonism through artistic practice, or that an artist would use constraints in order to formulate a work of art. It was Howell who, by using psychoanalytic apparatus, provided three basic concepts for the analysis or the performance, which were these: stillness, repetition and inconsistency. In addition, my artic-ulation of the research question was based on the bipolarities between purity
11 “The unconscious ceases to be what it is – a factory, a workshop – to become a theater, a scene and its staging. And not even an avant-garde theater, such as existed in Freud’s day (Wedekind), but the classical theater, the classical order of representation. The psychoanalyst becomes a director for a private theater, rather than the engineer or mechanic who sets up units of production, and grapples with collective agents of production and antiproduction. Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolu-tion; we don’t know when it started going bad" (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, 55).
12 For Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Imaginary defines a realm of conscious and unconscious images, which is not simply antagonistic to Real. Where Imaginary represents ego, Symbolic rep-resents the Other. Symbolic is the sphere of signification, in contradiction to the subject’s ego and self-image on the Imaginary. Real should not be confused with reality. It serves as a link between the Imaginary and Symbolic.
and impurity, ritual and transgression, or presence and absence. From these mildly archaic settings a task for the performer was to transgress through the imaginary ‘fourth wall’ between the audience and the performer. In retrospect, such a performance may be a very efficient tool for analysis or critique of a subject but, to my mind, it would be very difficult if not impossible to produce a difference, due to the disjunction with the immanent lack or austerity (manque) residing in the structure of Real-Symbolic-Imaginary (RSI). The idea of such primal territory leads to immediate juxtapositions between the desires of the members of audience and the performer, consequently leading to insult, aggres-sion, or transgression and – in the context of immaterial labour and modern biopolitics – to cynicism, exhaustion and depression. Following the concepts of Lacan and Kristeva, the only option for me at that moment was to rely on the Imaginary role of the audience for the performer, as representing the ‘evil eye’, and to confront it. The territorial stage of performance leads to fear and anxiety based on the Imaginary position.
In a paper entitled “Fascinance and Fascinum: Multitude between Evil Eye and Creation” (2008b) I defined this situation in the following way:
I am looking at the audience, but I am being looked at by the gaze from the audience, but on the level of imaginary. As a performer, I become a picture. It may feel like being on the tightrope, creating a constant but unconscious tension, which the audience is not aware of. Yet, this tension on the performance might lead to almost psychotic behaviour by the performer, which in turn for the members of the audience builds a feeling of hostility and uncertainty: as if looking at the performer being behind a glass. Following Lacan, in fact it is so for the performer, for whom the audience plays as the representative of the gaze, but on the level of Imaginary. The performer freezes under the gaze, and slips into the realm of Imaginary, maybe even into psychotic behaviour or psychosis.
Here, performance is a kind of ritual site for purification, where dirt becomes filth or abject. This had been the intuitive setting for some of the early performances of mine, such as Sex Circulation (1999) or Escape (1999) presented in Amsterdam, where I inserted acupuncture needles into the meridian of sexual energy, signi-fied with the names of my sexual partners, or where I was locked in my studio at the Rijksakademie for five days, without anyone being aware of it. I fasted on
bread and water while spending my time writing on the walls and making lists or drawings. Both performances manifested an inquiry for liminality or trans-gression as transcendence. Thus, at the beginning of my artistic research, this
’monastic’ and psychic apparatus prevailed – not unlike most body art practices akin to Ulay’s and Abramović’s performances. However, after the first artistic work in the research Loop Variations in 2008, I started to diverge from this dichotomy and presupposition into more constructed and dynamic subjectivity.
Starting from the autumn of 2007 I was very much involved with a research group, “mollecular organization”, which studied the functions of semio-capitalism in the present context. Mollecular organization aimed to develop soft technologies of co-operation, tools for building the impossible communities of abstract work and its performers. We aimed to innovate expressive support for the diverse enunciations. This group functioned from 2007 until 2012, when it transformed itself into Future Art Base. It was an offspring of the group of social, political and economic theorists13 where mollecular convened around Félix Guattari’s texts and, later on, the more recent writings of the Israeli artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger. This heterogeneous platform investigated the possibilities of collaboration and organization between the arts and theory, where the members involved came from various backgrounds in artistic practices14 and theoretical inquiries15. We collaborated both with theorists such as Ettinger, Franco ‘Bifo’
Berardi, Gary Genosko, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and with experimental artistic collectives such as the Performance Art Forum in France initiated by Jan Ritsema, the Ueinzz theatre group in São Paulo with Peter Pál Pelbart or Presque Ruines with the film-makers Graeme Thompson and Silvia Maglioni in France.
Apart from the seminars and workshops, mollecular organization translated books into Finnish, curated exhibitions and produced art projects16. As such, this organization had a crucial impact on my research inquiry and diverted it from the above-mentioned apparatus into the inquiry of the ontology of subject, collectivity and organization.
From the point of view of an assemblage – a particular consistency of time, space, people, matter, objects, abstract machines, concrete machines, values and
13 Akseli Virtanen, Jussi Vähämäki, Eetu Viren, Mikko Jakonen, Sakari Hänninen, Leena Aholainen, Pekka Piironen and Klaus Harju.
14 Heidi Fast, Karolina Kucia, Elina Latva, Kari Yli-Annala and Ana Fradique from the visual and performing arts.
15 Virtanen, Jakonen, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi and Ilona Hongisto from art history and feminist studies.
16 See more: www.mollecular.org
potentialities – the question of territory or transgression in performance is put in an altogether different light. From this point of view, performance practice is a site for production and not of analysis or healing – furthermore, it is not a scene of lack or austerity (manque). There is nothing missing or hidden and so performance always produces something. Assemblage creates consistency including abstract or concrete machines and different semiotic systems. It is a mobile construction, which is not a group, but a ”collection of heterogeneous (mixed) components from which subjectification is created, components that engage in a variety of semiotic and machinic processes of enunciation […] that are collective and neither human nor molar essences,” where desiring machines and their connections play a significant part (Young, Genosko and Watson 2013, 34). Machinic is what ties the desiring subject to the structure, and the collective within the subject. Guattari (1984, 114) writes in “Machine and Structure”, that
The voice, as speech machine, is the basis and determinant of the struc-tural order of language, and not the other way round. The individual, in his bodiliness, accepts the consequences of the interaction of signifying chains of all kinds, which cut across and tear him apart. The human being is caught where the machine and the structure meet.
In the state of the event of performance, where a performing subjectivity expe-riences the situation so differently from the everyday, there is a sense of dis-location, intensity and lack of significant direction. I would consider this as a performance in the machinic consciousness or the performance of the machinic itself, instead of the articulation of resistance17. However, machinic appears not through representations or signified meanings. It is not that I would recognize spots of a-signified ruptures of meaning, but that I may recognize the machinic itself in its heterogeneity. I do not say there would be any possibility to perceive this in totality, but rather that the machinic itself is perceived in the performance
17 “The essence of the machine is precisely this function of detaching a signifier as a representative, as a
‘differentiator’, as a causal break, different in kind from the structurally established order of things. It is this operation that binds the machine both to the desiring subject and to its status as the basis of the various structural orders corresponding to it. The machine, as a repetition of the particular, is a mode – perhaps indeed the only possible mode – of univocal representation of the various forms of subjectivity in the order of generality on the individual or the collective plane. […] The voice, as a speech machine, is the basis and determinant of the structural order of language, and not the other way round. The individual, in his bodiliness, accepts the consequences of the interaction of signifying chains of all kinds which cut across and tear him apart. The human being is caught where the machine and the structure meet" (ibid.).
affectively or as a ‘construct’. The performance is a terrain where the subject deterritorializes, where the subjectivity is both produced and effaced – the sub-jectivity in the making.
My argument today is that a performance – or any artistic or theoretical practice – is not an enclosed territory where the presence of an audience has the servile role of a malevolent or beneficial projection screen for the imaginary con-structions of a performing subject. This is already an altogether different position from what is often set for the performance, where the performer is regarded as servile, and the audience as the receiver of immaterial products. However, from the point of view of an assemblage, the audience also has another function than a receiving customer. Performance is as an assemblage with a particular set of functions that define its intensive connections with interiority and exteriority, mo-lar and molecumo-lar. There is no curative function in performance as an assemblage, performance as schizoproduction. It is not a site for a single line of escape (ligne de fuite), but performance needs to obtain a certain consistency. This consist-ency needs to be comprehended and articulated, where the consistconsist-ency of each assemblage does not function through borders, exclusion or inclusion. From this point of view, a transgressive performance relies on a ‘transcendental’ function of a ‘sovereign’ or ‘capitalist’ or, to put it in another way, performance produces by itself the ‘evil eye’ of the despot, through which the exceptions, scapegoats and abnormalities are counter-produced18. Transgressive practices have a desiring machine function for such despotic, imperial and sovereign powers, and so they modulate the consistency of the assemblage, as well.
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The artist may use research tools for solving a problem, but this is not yet ar-tistic research. Arar-tistic work and processes produce knowledge, which cannot be directly interpreted or transmitted into discursive knowledge. The artistic process in itself produces knowledge on its own terms, and so there is a need to articulate the methods and devices for artistic research and these methods and
18 “The goat’s anus stands opposite the face of the despot or god. Anything that threatens to put the system to flight will be killed or put to flight itself. Anything that exceeds the excess of the signifier or passes beneath it will be marked with a negative value. Your only choice will be between a goat’s ass and the face of the god, between sorcerers and priests. The complete system, then, consists of the paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the temple; […] the faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treated, and adorned by the priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight into the desert" (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 116).
findings in their own right. In his introductory text to a recent book, Practice as Research in The Arts, Robin Nelson (2013, 8-9) defined Practice as Research (PaR) as involving “a research project in which practice is a key method of inqui-ry” and stated that “proposed inquiry necessarily entailed practical knowledge which might primarily be demonstrated in practice.” He also distinguished PaR from practice-led-research and practice-based research, which “draws from, or is about, practice but which is articulated in traditional word-based forms (books or articles)” (op.cit., 10). For Nelson and Brad Haseman (2006, 4), there is a primacy in practice, where the practice is not “an optional extra; it is the necessary pre-condition of engagement in performative research,” and it is a multi-method led by practice. For Haseman, “performative research represents a move which holds that practice is the principal research activity – rather than only the practice of performance – and sees the material outcomes of practice as all-important representations of research findings in their own right" (op.cit., 5). In either case, PaR, Performative Research and Artistic research have their primacy on practice, and not only qualitative or quantitative methods; where the practice produces knowledge, which need not be verified by other means.
findings in their own right. In his introductory text to a recent book, Practice as Research in The Arts, Robin Nelson (2013, 8-9) defined Practice as Research (PaR) as involving “a research project in which practice is a key method of inqui-ry” and stated that “proposed inquiry necessarily entailed practical knowledge which might primarily be demonstrated in practice.” He also distinguished PaR from practice-led-research and practice-based research, which “draws from, or is about, practice but which is articulated in traditional word-based forms (books or articles)” (op.cit., 10). For Nelson and Brad Haseman (2006, 4), there is a primacy in practice, where the practice is not “an optional extra; it is the necessary pre-condition of engagement in performative research,” and it is a multi-method led by practice. For Haseman, “performative research represents a move which holds that practice is the principal research activity – rather than only the practice of performance – and sees the material outcomes of practice as all-important representations of research findings in their own right" (op.cit., 5). In either case, PaR, Performative Research and Artistic research have their primacy on practice, and not only qualitative or quantitative methods; where the practice produces knowledge, which need not be verified by other means.